I have owned many steel CX bikes, 3 aluminum and 1 carbon (ALAN) Steel is definately the most "compliant" not neccesarily most comfy as terrain, tyres and set up can have a huge impact. Carbon forks really help too.

Your tire pressure has more to do with comfort than the frame material (barring extreme cases). When I was training on clinchers here in Colorado, I could NOT train on my GT (big diameter aluminum), it killed my back. So I used my considerably flexier old Colnago (glued and screwed aluminum, with dual downtubes). As soon as I said "to hell with clinchers" and swtiched to training with tubies, I could run a reasonable tire pressure (no fear of pinch flats) and the GT became the training bike too.

As long as you don't have 75psi in your tires, a big tubed aluminum bike should not beat you up.

I design and produce ti-frames. Everyone are unique and designed to every customer. Here in giantic CC-bike. Think 590mm top tube and 220mm head tube...frame had 6 decree slope and it's still 64cm tall C-T! Frame has big diameter tubes so it's stiff. Owner said it's stiffer than his Cannondale mtb with same wheels. (He uses them also in mtb bike previosly, thanks to disks). Owner is 193cm tall with very tall legs.

Id go ti if you have the $$$. My cross bike is EL OS and I absolutely love the ride. My mtb and road are Ti and I do see a ti cross frame in my distant future, but I am not in a rush to replace it for now. I don't like the AL and Carbon frames I have ridden, but that is preference. I will say that a Carbon fork makes a world of difference, though. I'd take a steel frame/carbon fork over a tiframe/other fork any day.

There are many kind of CF forks. And they are made for average customer. Many of them are bad...

I'd say ti is better for fork. It can be designed to every customer inviduality. I have had 2 ti CC forks and they were different revision but both were good. Rev. 3 is ordered.

And steel is not very good if you use CC as winter training bike. Very thin walls and lot of salt and rocks flying from tyres. And I would take 0.9mm ti wall much more than 0.38mm steel for everyday training.

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